The Lovers

Introduction

The dialogue

The Lovers is a conversation about what philosophy is, narrated by Socrates. He tells, to no named listener, how he went into the school of Dionysius the writing-master and found two lads quarreling, it seemed, over astronomy, drawing circles and tilting their hands, while the lovers of the young sat by (132a–b). He asks the man beside him what the two are so earnest about, and the conversation that follows is with two rival lovers of the same boy: an athlete, who thinks philosophy idle talk, and a man of music and letters, “the one who laid claim to being wiser”, who thinks it fine (132b–133b). No one is named but Socrates, Dionysius, Homer (135a), and three thinkers: Anaxagoras and Oenopides, whom the lads seemed to be quarreling about, and Solon, whom the musician quotes. The dialogue fills pages 132 to 139 of the first volume of Stephanus’ edition, by whose pages Plato is still cited, and thirteen pages of Burnet’s Oxford text.

Burnet’s manuscripts call it Erastai, “Lovers”; a later hand in the margin of B gives the title Anterastai, “Rival Lovers”, under which the ancient arrangement of Plato’s works by Thrasyllus, preserved by Diogenes Laertius (3.59), places it last in the fourth tetralogy, after the two Alcibiades and the Hipparchus, with the subtitle “or On Philosophy”, and classes it as “ethical”; Burnet’s second volume prints the four in that order. Its authorship was doubted in antiquity. Thrasyllus counts it among Plato’s genuine dialogues (3.57–59), yet he identifies the unnamed speaker for whom the philosopher is like a pentathlete only under a condition, “if the Rival Lovers is Plato’s” (9.37); Diogenes himself cites it, without doubt, as the place where Plato names Dionysius, the master from whom he learned his letters (3.4). Most modern scholars do not think it Plato’s, though it has had defenders, and no date for it is certain.

The question and the answers

The athlete calls the lads’ talk “prattling about the things up in the sky, and talking nonsense, philosophizing” (132b), and his rival, asked whether “philosophizing is fine or not”, answers, “if ever I thought philosophizing shameful, I would not even consider myself a man” (132d–133b). Socrates asks whether one can know that a thing is fine or shameful without knowing what it is (133b), and so what philosophizing is. The musician answers with Solon’s line, “I grow old always learning many things”: the man who is going to philosophize “must in this way always be learning one thing at least … so as to learn as much as possible in his life” (133c). Philosophy, then, is “much learning”, and it is good as well as fine (133c–d).

Socrates tests the answer against the athlete’s own pursuit. Is much labor the love of exercise, as much learning is philosophy (133e)? The musician says so; the athlete, nudged into the argument, says that “even a pig would know that moderate labors put bodies in good condition” (134a–b). The musician concedes that it is not the many but the moderate exercises that produce good condition, and then that in food, in everything to do with the body, and in what is given to the soul, “the subjects of learning” among them, it is the moderate that benefits (134c–d). But who is to judge what is moderate for the soul, as the doctor or the trainer judges for the body and the farmer for the sowing of seeds? At this “we were all of us now full of perplexity” (134e–135a).

The argument’s main stretch

Socrates tries “another way” (135a). Which subjects of learning should the philosopher learn, since not all, nor many? The wiser lover answers: those that bring “the greatest reputation for philosophy”, which a man would have “if he seemed to be experienced in all the crafts, or if not, in as many as possible”, knowing of them what is fitting for free men to learn, “whatever belongs to understanding, not whatever belongs to handiwork” (135b). Not, he explains, that the philosopher must know each craft “precisely, like the man who has the craft himself”, but “as is reasonable for a free and educated man”: he must be able to follow what the craftsman says better than those present, and to contribute a judgment of his own, “so as to seem the most accomplished and the wisest” (135c–d). Socrates offers him an image, and he accepts it. The philosopher is like the pentathlete, second to the racer in the race and to the wrestler in wrestling, first among the other athletes: “a kind of runner-up in everything” (135e–136a). The wiser lover is pleased with it: the philosopher, he says, is “the sort not to be a slave to any one thing”, but “to have laid hold of all of them in moderation” (136a–b).

Then Socrates asks what such a man is good for. The good are useful, the base useless, and philosophers, the wiser lover says, are most useful (136b–c). But in sickness, asked whether he would bring “that runner-up” into the house or get the doctor, the wiser lover answers “Both”, and then the doctor, “both rather and first”; in a storm he would rather trust himself to the pilot; and to Socrates’ question, “Then so too in everything else: as long as there is any craftsman, the philosopher is not useful?”, he answers, “It appears so” (136c–d). Since “there always are craftsmen”, philosophers are useless, and by the wiser lover’s account “base and useless as long as there are crafts among men” (136e–137b).

The ending

“But I suspect, my friend, that they are not so,” Socrates says, and that philosophizing is not being in earnest about the crafts, “nor learning much, but something else” (137b). He starts again from horses and dogs: the craft that makes them best also knows how to punish them rightly, and knows the decent and the worthless among them; the same holds for men, and the knowledge that rightly punishes the unruly in cities is the judge’s, which is justice (137b–d). Whoever knows one knows many, and whoever is ignorant of many is ignorant of one; so a man who does not know the decent and worthless men does not know himself (137d–138a). Not to know oneself is not to be temperate, so knowing oneself is being temperate, and this, it seems, is what “the inscription at Delphi urges: to practice temperance and justice”; and since the same knowledge punishes rightly and distinguishes oneself and others, justice and temperance prove to be “the same thing” (138a–b). Cities are well ordered when wrongdoers pay the penalty; the statesman’s art, the king’s and the tyrant’s, and the household manager’s and the master’s prove to be one craft with justice and temperance (138b–c).

Here the philosopher cannot be a runner-up. It would be shameful for him to be unable to follow or contribute when a judge or a king speaks, and he must not entrust his own household to another, “nor hold the second prizes in this, but must himself punish, judging rightly”; when his friends or his city ask him to judge, it is shameful “to appear second or third and not to lead” (138d–139a). “Then, my excellent friend, for us philosophizing is far from being either much learning or busying oneself with the crafts.” The wise one falls silent, “ashamed of what had been said before”; the unlearned one agrees; “and the others praised what had been said” (139a).

What is most exposed

Four things in this dialogue are likely to trouble a first-time reader, and they are best stated plainly.

First, it may not be Plato’s. Thrasyllus, though he counted it among the genuine dialogues, spoke of it under a condition (Diogenes Laertius 3.57–59, 9.37); most modern scholars doubt it, though the dialogue has had defenders; this edition calls it Plato’s only in the sense that the tradition handed it down among his works.

Second, the dialogue says what philosophy is not, and only by implication what it is. It refutes “much learning” and the runner-up’s smattering of every craft, and ends with “far from” (139a). What it puts in their place, the knowledge by which one knows oneself and rightly orders one’s household and one’s city, is reached by identification, not definition: the judge’s knowledge is justice, knowing oneself is temperance, these two are “the same thing”, and the arts of king, tyrant, statesman, household manager and master are one with them (137d–138c). Whether philosophy is that craft, or the knowledge of it, or the love of it, the dialogue does not say.

Third, several steps are short. From those who know horses the argument passes to a horse that does not know the decent and base horses, from that to the horse that does not know itself, and then to the man (137e–138a; see the note there); the knowledge of many and of one is asserted, not shown (137d–e); justice and temperance are made one because that by which “we know how to punish rightly” is also that by which we know how “to distinguish both oneself and others” (138a–b); and the tyrant is set beside the king as though the name made no difference, where the Statesman sets the two apart (276e). A reader may take these as faults, or as an exercise in finding them; the dialogue does not say which.

Fourth, much of it can be read as a gathering of themes from other dialogues of the tetralogy and beyond: self-knowledge and temperance joined at Delphi, as in the Charmides (164d–165a); the king, the statesman and the household manager as one knowledge, argued in the Statesman (258e–259c) and touched in the Alcibiades I (133d–e); the specialist preferred to the man of general learning, as the doctor and the pilot are preferred throughout the dialogues. That reading is an interpretation; the dialogue names none of them.

The manner

The comedy is in the persons and in the timing. The rivals trade scorn. The musician says that the athlete “has spent his whole life having his neck twisted, stuffing himself and sleeping” (132c), and the athlete answers in kind, that “even a pig would know that moderate labors put bodies in good condition”, how much more “a man, at any rate, sleepless and unfed, with an unrubbed neck, and thin with worries” (134a–b); “the lads were delighted and laughed at it, and the other blushed”. The wiser lover speaks loudly “so that his beloved should hear him” (133b), and answers “very ironically” with two answers, one for his rival and one for Socrates (133d). Socrates is “dazzled” by the young and beautiful, as always (133a), and when the lovers are stuck he offers, “teasing them”, to put the question to the lads: “Or are we perhaps ashamed, as Homer said of the suitors”, who would not let anyone else string the bow? (135a). The pentathlete comes as a compliment, “a kind of runner-up in everything”, and the wiser lover takes it as one (136a); Socrates then asks where these runners-up are useful. At the end the one who claimed much learning is silent and “the unlearned one” agrees (139a). The translation tries to keep all of this and to add nothing; where the English cannot carry a joke, a note says what it was.

On reading this edition

Each left-hand page is a page of Burnet’s Oxford text, line for line, with his apparatus at the foot; each right-hand page translates it, with the Stephanus section letters in the margin so that any passage can be found on both sides. Burnet’s Greek has no quotation marks and no names of speakers: Socrates narrates, and each speech begins with a capital. The English sets the speeches in quotation marks, as English narrative does. A word in angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ in the Greek is not in the manuscripts and has been supplied by a scholar’s conjecture; it is translated. Words in square brackets [ ] are ones Burnet thought spurious; they are not translated. Solon’s verse at 133c is set as verse on both pages. The Key Words of the Dialogue, which follow, explain the words on which the argument turns and how they are rendered. At the back, the Outline gives the argument’s joints by Stephanus page, the Editorial Note sets out the conventions of both pages and explains the abbreviations of the apparatus, the Glossary lists the renderings for reference, and the Note on this Edition says how the volume was made and where a reader should be careful.

A note on the persons

The dialogue establishes little about its persons. The narrator is Socrates, whom the wiser lover calls by name from his first words (132c) and throughout, and the athlete once (134a); he is susceptible to beauty (133a) and teases the lovers. The two lovers are rivals for the same boy (132c, 133b). One has spent his time on music, the other on gymnastics (132d); the musician claims to be wiser and is called “the wiser one” and, at the end, “the wise one” (135b, 139a), the athlete “the unlearned one” (139a). The lads are among the young “who were thought the most comely in looks and born of esteemed fathers” (132a). None is named.

The rest comes from other sources. Diogenes Laertius says that Plato learned his letters from Dionysius, the master named here (3.4). Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (about 500–428 BC) taught at Athens and held the sun to be a fiery stone (Xenophon, Memorabilia 4.7.7). Oenopides of Chios, a mathematician and astronomer of the fifth century, first found the slant of the zodiac, as Eudemus records (Theon of Smyrna, p. 198 Hiller). Solon, the Athenian lawgiver and poet of the early sixth century, wrote the line the musician quotes (fragment 18 West). Thrasyllus, as Diogenes reports (9.37), thought that if the dialogue is Plato’s the unnamed speaker for whom the philosopher is like a pentathlete would be Democritus of Abdera; nothing in the dialogue itself names him.